Sebold returned home to Massasuchets for several months before returning to Syracuse to finish her bachelor's degree and study writing. On October 5, 1981, while walking down a street near the Syracuse campus, she recognized her rapist.[2] She notified police and testified against the rapist in court; he was convicted of rape and sodomy, and sentenced to eight to 25 years. Her attacker is out of prison now, but Sebold says she has not kept track of his whereabouts.[2][3]

Following graduation from Syracuse in 1984, Sebold briefly attended the University of Houston[4] in Texas, for graduate school, then moved to Manhattan for the next ten years. She held several waitressing jobs while pursuing a writing career,[5] but neither her poetry nor her attempts at writing a novel came to fruition. She also began using heroin recreationally.[6] Sebold recounted her substance abuse to students at an Evening of Fiction workshop by saying: "I did a lot of things that I am not particularly proud of and that I can’t believe that I did."[7]

Sebold began writing the book that would become Lucky in New York, as a ten-page assignment for her class. In its first drafts, the book was a fictionalized version of her rape and its aftermath; while in graduate school, Sebold turned the book into a "misery memoir."[8] The book's title came from a policeman who had told Sebold that she was lucky to be alive, since another young woman had been killed and dismembered in the same tunnel.[2]

At age 33, Sebold then began writing a novel called Monsters, about the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl. The story was based on her realization that "within the suburban world of my upbringing there was as many strange stories as there were in the more romanticized parts of the world."[8] The novel eventually became The Lovely Bones, which one reviewer called "a disturbing story, full of horror and confusion and deep, bone-weary sadness. And yet it reflects a moving, passionate interest in and love for ordinary life as its most wonderful, and most awful, even at its most mundane." The New York Times observed that "Ms. Sebold [has] the ability to capture both the ordinary and the extraordinary, the banal and the horrific, in lyrical, unsentimental prose."[8]

In an interview with Publishers Weekly, Sebold said, "I was motivated to write about violence because I believe it's not unusual. I see it as just a part of life, and I think we get in trouble when we separate people who've experienced it from those who haven't. Though it's a horrible experience, it's not as if violence hasn't affected many of us."[9]The Lovely Bones remained first on the Times Bestseller list for five months, was adapted into a 2009 film of the same name by Peter Jackson.

Sebold's second novel, The Almost Moon, continued what The New Yorker called "Sebold's fixation on terror." It begins, "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily."

Sebold also guest-edited The Best American Short Stories 2009. The process required her to read over 200 submitted short stories, and to choose twenty for inclusion in the anthology.[10]